Why do statistics journals generally have low impact factors, long publication times, and low acceptance rates?
I've been investigating statistics journals to submit my work to (specifically, an application paper). Many journals are specialized, others quite general.
However, I've noticed that top journals in the field (e.g., sub-journals of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS)) generally exhibit the above traits. In many cases, the impact factor is less than 2. In certain cases, the time from submission to publication is 1.5-2 years in duration. In the majority of cases, the acceptance rate is ~10% or lower. Some of the most celebrated contributions to statistics have been published in this way. This trend has been previously investigated by van Nierop (2009) for example (Title: Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?). Interestingly, the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) currently enjoys an impact factor of 3.7, but long times between submission and publication. A similar trend exists for RSS Series B: Statistical Methodology.
Long wait times appear to explain why impact factors are so low, but the association is not causal.
For important work, these trends can be discouraging. A solution however exists in the form of preprints to avoid potentially being "scooped".
Could someone weigh in on this? CV has many seasoned statisticians who've likely served on journal editorial boards at some point in their career.
Reference
Van Nierop, E. (2009), Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?. Statistica Neerlandica, 63: 52-62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9574.2008.00408.x
1 Answer
The low impact factor in statistics isn't necessarily a sign of low quality, but a reflection of how the community consumes research. Unlike medicine or biology, where a breakthrough paper gets thousands of citations within a year, statistical methods often take years to be integrated into software or adopted by practitioners. Because impact factors only count citations from a very short window (usually two years), they fail to capture the "slow burn" of a foundational paper that becomes a standard reference a decade later. The long publication times and low acceptance rates stem from the nature of the peer review process in this field. Reviewers aren't just checking if your logic is sound; they're often re-deriving proofs or running your code to ensure the method actually works. For an application paper, editors want to see that your method provides a genuine improvement over existing ones, not just a slight tweak. This rigorous vetting process creates a bottleneck, leading to those multi-year wait times. If you're worried about the timeline, your best bet is to submit to a preprint server immediately. This timestamps your work, protecting you from being scooped while you navigate the slow journal cycle. When choosing a journal, decide if you value the prestige of a low-acceptance "top" journal or the speed of a more specialized one. Just be warned that rushing into a lower-tier journal for the sake of speed can sometimes make it harder to get your work noticed by the people who actually influence the field.
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